Gaining visitors by headline news

is this right?

[troi21]

I have been looking around for promotion tips and on two sites i have read articles suggesting monitoring news items and creating a web page with a little keyword rich text and links and then paying to have a couple search engines pick it up quickly in order to draw visitors (that was a very long sentence!) is that a good idea? sure i would get visitors but wouldn't it be untargetted interest?

[sem4u]

Well if the articles fit in with your site then it sounds like a good idea.

[troi21]

im talking about news headlines about the pending war or a celebrity death when i sell shoes (for example).

[gsx]

You may get more visitors, but you use up bandwidth and they won't buy shoes if they are searching for information on the war.

[ppg]

If you keep your news pages archived then surely you don't need to pay to get the traffic in quick?

If the news item is closely related to the site's content, then perhaps its less important for it to be day-by-day topical, some news items can be relevant to your visitors for longer than a couple of days.

One of my better pulling pages last month was a news item that was put in the month before and then picked up by the google update. I wasn't optimising for any particular keywords, but the title turned out to have a fairly common search with little competition, not traffic doubling or anything, but it all helps. I would have thought longer term more specialised news items would work better for targetted traffic than generic of-the-moment.

Just a thought